In modern medicine, a considerable number of interventional procedures have been developed and typically require physiologic monitoring of a patient using various imaging techniques and diagnostic instrumentation. Indeed, image guided procedures employing visual displays to guide and assist a physician operator are commonplace in the interventional laboratories and operating theaters. A variety of instrumentation modalities provide images to guide interventional procedures. In some situations, images are acquired prior to the interventional procedure or treatment. Other approaches involve acquiring images at the beginning of the procedure, while still some other procedures involve the acquisition of data in real-time.
Commonly used instrumentation modalities used to image patient anatomy and physiology include 1) X-ray (radiation transmitted through a body and received with a sensor to produce an image), 2) fluoroscopy (an x-ray variant with dynamic imaging), 3) computerized tomography (“CT”), 4) magnetic resonance imaging (“MRI”), and 5) acoustics/echo.
In addition to imaging, various physiological parameters are often monitored during an interventional procedure. For example, such physiological monitoring may include the use of an electrocardiogram, blood pressure monitoring, blood oxygenation sensors, etc. For electrophysiological applications, electrical activity in a designated tissue area, such as the heart, may be monitored or recorded to aid a physician in diagnosing and/or treating a patient. Such electrograms corresponding to underlying physiological mechanisms or morphologies may provide a wealth of information for such diagnoses and treatment.
Combining imaging capacity with electrophysiological information in an easily accessible, informative presentation to the physician benefits diagnosis and treatment efforts, and accordingly, there is an ongoing need to provide improvements in both the presentation of such information, as well as processing methodology and correlation to clinically-relevant conditions to provide enhanced information about the characteristics or behavior of a particular treatment or diagnosis site.